Soybean (Glycine max) is an important crop and is a primary food source in many areas of the world. The methods of biotechnology have been applied to soybean for improvement of agronomic traits and the quality of the product. One such agronomic trait is increased yield.
Increased yield may be achieved in transgenic plants by the expression of a transgene capable of providing such increased yield. The expression of foreign genes in plants is known to be influenced by many factors, such as the regulatory elements used in the transgene cassette, the chromosomal location of the transgene insert, the proximity of any endogenous regulatory elements close to the transgene insertion site, and environmental factors such as light and temperature. For example, it has been observed that there may be a wide variation in the overall level of transgene expression or in the spatial or temporal pattern of transgene expression between similarly-produced events. For this reason, it is often necessary to screen hundreds of independent transformation events in order to ultimately identify one event useful for commercial agricultural purposes. Such an event, once identified as having the desired transgene expression, molecular characteristics and the improved trait, may then be used for introgressing the improved trait into other genetic backgrounds using plant breeding methods. The resulting progeny would contain the transgenic event and would therefore have the transgene expression characteristics for that trait of the original transformant. This may be used to produce a number of different crop varieties that comprise the improved trait and are suitably adapted to specific local growing conditions.